WhatsApp blues
Until last month I was in around 15 WhatsApp groups. Then one day I quit all but six family and professional groups. The remaining members of the groups which I left were hurt, appalled, angry and puzzled. I tried to explain to them that I had left because WhatsApp had brought together on one platform people who I had spent a lifetime avoiding. It is one thing to say hello, how are you, once in about ten years and quite another to wake up each morning to find these fellows behaving as if they know everything about everything. This is true of family groups, too, but as someone said, unlike friends you can’t choose your relatives. Atal Behari Vajpayee had said the same thing about neighbours like China and Pakistan.
One big problem I have with these social media groups like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp is that they allow mere acquaintances and even people you don’t know to be rude to you. In fact, even good friends cross the line sometimes. Recently I posted an innocuous joke on one of the college groups and got a prompt reprimand that this was in poor taste and had no place in a group like ours. I told him to have some isabgol and quit the group.
Indeed, it was for the same reasons that I left both Facebook and Twitter a few years ago, and have never got on to Instagram. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would want to continue to be a member of a WhatsApp group that has a motley crowd of old and young people who either never engage but remain members in a voyeur-like way, or, when they do engage, it’s either to express an uninformed opinion or to send out countless forwards. I mean, why not do it bilaterally, choosing your interlocutors carefully? One man’s riveting news is usually trivia for everyone else.
To my horror, what ultimately happened, I must confess rather sheepishly, is that I had become a compulsive forwarder of all sorts of things that I assumed the others would find funny or interesting. This dismaying realisation was an important factor in my quitting the various groups. In all of these there were only one or two or perhaps three who shared my interests. So why was I trying to share things with the rest? The answer became blindingly obvious: because I could. It was like going into a room with lots of people and talking to them merely because they were there. In other words,
I had probably become an awful bore. Sorry, not probably…. but definitely.
There was also the addiction. What was fun in the beginning when you established contact with long-lost acquaintances gradually turned into an obsessiveness.
I know it’s like that for others too. They may not post anything but they do keep checking their phones. I once gave a lecture at a university where the audience of about 800 students hardly heard a word of what I said.
They were all busy checking their phones…
